The healer’s message on my phone machine spoke of logistics—when and where we’d meet—but ended with her saying, I think your trip is really great, and when you call me I’ll tell you why. Talk about building psychic suspense.A few hours later we spoke. She was between patients, so had only a few minutes to schedule our session and explain to me why she’d asked my brother to have me call her.
She told me I was blocked in my relationship with my parents. That I seemed to be taking 3 steps back for every 1 step forward. She sensed a jarring motion in my life but also a sort of static-y energy. I needed to let go. It was something that went back 6 or 7 generations on my mom’s side. I needed to release all that, she said, so I could be free to really enjoy this trip, to experience all the epiphanies that this pilgrimage might offer me.
Does that resonate with you? She asked.
It had all poured in so hard and fast there was no space for resonance. And there’s not much time before I leave. It seems a tall order to work through 6 or 7 generations of static before I get on that plane.
Maybe, I replied. It’s kind of a lot to take in.
Duh
Later (I’m a slow study) it occurred to me that everything this woman knows about me comes from my brother. Which means that this is probably more about how he sees me than about how she does. So I left a message for my brother saying, We need to talk.
(Painting at top of post is Howard Finster's Planet Kerlein, City of Lebial.)
6 comments:
I like this scene in the movie "Ordinary People" (Robert Redford's directorial debut) where Timothy Hutton tells psychiatrist Judd Hirsch about a dream he keeps having where a side of his shoe gets worn off.
An over-the-phone analysis about such intimate matters doesn't feel right, IMHO. I would celebrate the walk you're about to take. The walk's the thing. A pilgrimage is what it is: through discipline and suffering, perhaps a favorable hallucination now and again, does a penitent find a clearer vision.
I would, with great modesty, suggest answering or reckoning a reflection on the phone exchange until after your sublime effort. There could, after all, be a great number of folks you're taking along with you, in your head, as it were. Perhaps your effort is also a pilgrimage for them, doing the work they cannot find a way of doing themselves.
I met a mother in a church in Barcelona, a very unusual church, chock-a-block full of mementos, floor to ceiling plastic doll arms and legs, heads, and locks of braided hair, every bewildering fragment of our mortal coil was pinned or hammered onto the wooden walls. In a fractured exchange the mother told me she came here most days from a neighborhood some miles away. Poverty etc, had relocated her progressively further away from the bustling city and the church she'd know since a child. Yet she was there, speaking for members of her soon-to-be-deceased family. She was the only one left able. If not her then who?
Infirmity takes many forms.
Walking's the thing. Moving forward while looking backward, illuminating collisions are destined to occur.
kjp, I loved your post. And how right you are that I'm taking a lot of people with me in my head. In fact, I've just started asking those near and dear to me if there's any prayer or entreaty they'd like me to carry for them along the way and deliver to Santiago at the end of my pligrimage. I will extend the same offer to you.
Yes, I have a request. Though I'm not a supplicant, pride forbids me, would you say a word for me, about the aforementioned 'pride' thing? And a short prayer for my tormented mother, Dolores. She once told me, "It means 'pain' in Spanish." Boy, does it. And...
Upon reflection, I need to do this walk myself. Would welcome the work.
you got it, kjp. Pride and pain. Things we call have in common. Your messages will be delivered.
One good thing about carrying prayers and messsages for others is that it will make me all the more likely to complete the pilgrimage, not abandon the Camino when things get rough.
My prayers, and those of others, are safe in your hands. You'll not abandon the Camino. We would not pray otherwise.
Faith.
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